A neo-monastic institution, offering its support to the wider population, should of course also be linked to activities such as criminal rehabilitation, psychiatry, social work, palliative care (of the terminally ill), the development of more customized and meaningful funeral ceremonies—and of course to education, where the opportunities for psychological and existential support should not only be a background structure as it is today, but a central and prioritized feature of life in schools and universities. Not to mention healthcare more generally; most present-day healthcare systems are bogged down with people seeking medical attention when they in fact have social, emotional and existential problems—as any general practitioner can attest to. So often will people come in with a headache or stomachache but soon start crying about their life problems.
It should be a societal goal that 18-year-olds enter adult life with a sense of inner responsibility and self-love, which sadly is far from the case in today’s educational system. As argued in Book One, all children can and should be offered therapeutic talks with a trusted adult professional throughout their years in school. How many life courses could that change; and how profoundly? Very many, and quite profoundly indeed—seeing as you get a cumulative, collective effect as the children and youth interact with one another.
If we are to turn the tide of spiritual poverty and alienation inherent to modern life, we must begin to nourish the souls of millions. Only then can we develop a metamodern society, a society that takes its own development—interior and exterior—into its own hands. If there is one thing that characterizes the emerging meta-ideology I call the Nordic ideology, it is this: a systematic and deliberate nourishing of the human soul throughout the life course; a clarion call for adult development.
How to get there is far from obvious, but without an explicitly formulated and manifested Existential Politics, and without proper societal processes to address these concerns, we are unlikely to achieve any such goals.
Meditation and Society
We are thus imagining a future in which we as a society find ways of monitoring the development of a number of key issues that pertain to the inner growth and existential wellbeing of all members of society—then offering support to all citizens during key transitional periods of their lives in accordance with their needs and longings.
This will lead to significantly less social and economic fallout of people’s periods of crisis, and it will seriously boost the number of highly functional and mentally healthy people.
In a similar vein Existential Politics should work to develop the meditation skills and the level of introspection and meta-cognition in society at large, as well as raising the average inner “subjective state” experienced by people in everyday life.
So basically, it should be a long-term goal to train everybody in contemplation, self-observation and meditation, starting from early childhood when our brains are especially malleable. If we transform not only the content of people’s minds and the nature of our human relations, but the very base structure by which our minds function, we transform society.
Meditation and society. There are two different ways to think about this, one of them wrong and the other correct and productive. As so often is the case with these things, almost all observers and practitioners think about it in the wrong way.
Let’s start with the incorrect, stupid way of thinking about this. It goes something like this: “Because meditation is good for you and has a bunch of benefits, people should do more of it, and if we get everyone to do lots of it, then all things will be much better.”
There is some truth to this statement—indeed, if one advanced society has everyone above age nine meditating for 20 minutes per day and another society doesn’t, all things equal, the first is likely to be somewhat better off in terms of how people feel and behave—but that really is just a piss in the Mississippi, and there are no guarantees. The problem is that we’re viewing meditation as:
a specific, delineated activity,
as a binary question of either-or,
as a static “thing” that can be “added”, and
as something to instrumentally do for the sake of other benefits.
With this kind of thinking, meditation so often becomes an unexamined prop taken to have semi-magical properties, or it is scorned as a cheap trick, or subjected to a one-time evaluation trial and then either rejected wholesale or used in other, unrelated contexts.
The reason people think this way about meditation is of course that they have limited knowledge of and/or experience with it, or that there is some kind of seduction to the idea of this black box fix-it-all. But while understandable and forgivable, this way of thinking about meditation simply is not what can and will transform society.
The second and correct way of viewing meditation-in-society becomes apparent once you zoom in on the phenomenon—experientially, analytically and scientifically. Meditation turns out not to be a convenient black box or a nifty add-on, but a whole continent .
Think about it, how huge isn’t your inner landscape? It truly is a vast continent. When we talk about meditation and the inner work of consciously examining and affecting these inner landscapes—are we looking at certain techniques for concentration, or inner familiarization with which emotions arise and how, or direct inquiries into what consciousness itself is, or techniques to calm or quiet the mind, or techniques to increase the subtlety and sharpness of our perceptions of sensations throughout the body, or the practice of not reacting negatively to unpleasant sensations but only responding with equanimity, or the perception and work with subtle inner experienced flows through our guts, or the deliberate efforts to shift to alternate mental states, or the contemplation of deep mysteries or koans, or staring at white walls, or walking or moving our bodies very mindfully, or looking very mindfully at a certain object of beauty until all thoughts fade away, or meticulously studying one’s thought structures and their phenomenological underpinnings, or cultivating certain attitudes or emotions like loving-kindness and compassion, or contemplating our greatest fears to try to get over our aversions towards them, or contemplating our most eager desires to try to transcend our attachments, or trying to remind ourselves of some profound truths to guide us, or are we just sitting down with no expectation, or doing something else that has to do with wordless relations beyond any and all “techniques”, or the listening to a soothing sound, or the visualization of a peaceful place, or a radical dive into the very moment of Now, or the subtle exploration of the topology of the inner horizon—i.e. how our inner landscape is shaped as space—or using self-suggestion and mantras, or lying down and exploring the edges of sleep and being awake and the possibilities of “lucid dreaming” (when we dream but we know it), or actively using our breath as a mood regulator, or trying to purify our minds from old mental toxins by means of processes of identifying with the things we don’t like and see that they were really parts of ourselves all along…
You see where I’m going. Each of these forms of meditation and countless others I didn’t mention are, in turn, not singular “things”; each of them is a rich process with trapdoors and potentials. Each of them can take a lifetime to learn and explore. Simply: Since the inner world is vast, when awareness and attention are brought to operate upon consciousness itself, there are thousands or millions of actions that can be taken, millions of mental events that can occur.
Add to this that each of these forms of meditation can be 1) taught and explained in different ways, 2) practiced for different lengths of time and at different times of the day with different intervals, 3) practiced in very different social contexts and situations, 4) used for different age groups or other forms of calibrations, 5) used or learned in any sequence or combination of different techniques, 6) studied empirically and evaluated and spread in acc
ordance with best practices, 7) evaluated by different criteria of success or failure, such as preventing mental illness, reducing stress, increasing subjective state or successfully integrating traumatic experiences, and 8) interacting with any number of psychological, neurological or psychiatric variables, including possible risks and adverse effects.
All things said and done, it should be understood that “meditation and society” is not a straightforward relationship. It is a rich field which holds many subtle but profound possibilities of societal transformation.
A good comparison can be made to other basic skills, namely reading, writing and arithmetic. If you teach a kid to read and write, it doesn’t necessarily make them much smarter, and it doesn’t in itself guarantee a good life. It all depends, of course, on what this person will be reading and writing. If they read Nazi propaganda and poorly spelled snuff porn all day, only breaking off to write hate emails to members of their local minority population, they would perhaps have been better off without literacy after all.
The point is that literacy is a whole world, a whole continent. It’s not this “one thing” that can be “implemented” and should or should not be done 20 minutes per day.
And yet, literacy is fundamental to our society. To metamodern society, meditation—contemplation, introspection, phenomenological exploration—is that fundamental. The human mind is running haywire and diving right into a global super-nano-robotics-AI-bio-digitized economy galore, and you want to leave our minds unchecked, unexamined and without proper tools for self-scrutiny and self-knowledge? That, my friend, would be as crazy as trying to run a modern society without literacy and arithmetic. Meditation is that fundamental. It’s self-observation and self-reflection, a higher layer of self-organization.
If we had told a peasant in the 1700s that their children should stop working the fields to go learn something called “chemistry” and “physics” by looking at letters and numbers, this would indeed have seemed very abstract and as a waste of time. To the modern mind, investments in developing the inner world necessarily appear wasteful and frivolous in a corresponding manner. Not only is the modern mind focused on outward progress and achievement, but its very sense of reality is built around intersubjective verification. Hence, turning inwards to what cannot be seen and shown in the intersubjective realm appears as a way of turning away from reality itself.
There are some promising beginnings in the work of secular Buddhists such as Robert Wright and Sam Harris, just as there is plenty of research, neurological and other, in prominent scientists such as Richard Davidson, Tania Singer, Olga Klimecki, Daniel Siegel and others who would deserve mentioning—many of whom work with experienced meditators and do indeed confirm they have unusually happy and healthy brains (and even vagus nerves, how about that). Long story short, meditation is a real thing.
One obstacle to getting anywhere in terms of meditation-in-society is that it deals with a hypercomplex entity: the brain, or our nervous system as a whole with interacting physiological systems. As such it is difficult to generalize knowledge about it: I may experience bliss and healing doing one type of meditation, but you might find the same exercise boring or even harmful. (Whatever theories, models or metaphors we can glean about the nature of meditation and inner experience, these must, for the foreseeable future, remain pale “shadows on the wall”, recognized facets of surface phenomena, as compared to the actual intricacies of what is actually going on.)
Too often people will have a very good experience with one technique and then try to evangelize it to the world; “oh, if only everyone did exactly this one thing, in this particular sequence!” [98] But in reality, patterns of inner growth and experience are very hard to generalize, even to ourselves over time. We are so, so far away from an exact predictive science in this field, even if there are certainly compelling research results. And the same goes for psychology, really. All psychological theories and traditions are in fact pale shadows of the complexity and depth of the actual mind.
This, of course, leaves plenty of room for Existential Politics to pool considerable resources into learning how the inner landscapes of humans can be developed, and which practices can be taught and how, when, where etc. Research, implementation, professional roles, countering adverse effects of training, ethics… We need a real, institutional platform for the administration of long-term inner development. We require an ongoing process in society to take meditation as seriously as reading and writing.
Transpersonal Integrity
I realize this subchapter title sounds a bit conceited. After all, who am I to tell you what “integrity” means? To have integrity means to stand up for oneself and one’s beliefs, to be reliable, honest and straightforward! To live up to our own standards—and so on.
I will now take a four-page detour to talk about integrity so that we can get to the point relevant to Existential Politics and how it connects to the rebirth of the monastery.
These days you can find any number of commentators—even among the most highly esteemed scholars—who will claim that “a good society is built upon the integrity of the individual”. And the integrity of the individual is taken to mean some kind of true moral inner worth—being reliable and forthright. It is taken to be some sort of residual essence of goodness, residing in the heart of the individual person.
I agree that, if we were indeed talking about “integrity” in the above and mainstream sense, it would be a conceited endeavor to define it and say there should be more of it. That’s just taking our own narrow frame of a “good person” and trying to force other people to conform to it, subtly judging them if they don’t. And it requires at least some kind of “God” as to give a final say on who has the prettiest soul. It’s just an advanced version of Snow White’s evil witch stepmother: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the prettiest soul of all?” All of this requires a fundamental reliance upon what I have called “the guilt-regime”.
To the metamodern mind, integrity looks very different.
First of all, a true metamodernist “killed God”. (And then we killed the modern residual God, and then killed the yet subtler residual postmodern God, and pissed and spat on their graves. And then we revived God on the third day as a co-created meta-pattern of a self-organizing multiplicity of perspectives, which includes the said three dead Gods… But that’s another story, so let’s not get carried away with theology, fun as it is). Point being: If there is no God to serve as ultimate umpire, there can be no final goodness or badness of a soul, not even circumscribed as the “integrity” of a person. There are only different descriptive variables, and perspectives or methodologies from which these can be known, and different comparisons that can be made to evaluate these.
Secondly, the metamodern perspective is fundamentally non-judgmental . In other words, it is based upon a radical acceptance of “reality-as-it-is”, which necessarily includes any “evil that men do” and whatever “integrity” people may have or not. Without non-judgment there can be no metamodern “solidarity with all perspectives”, which is the cornerstone of metamodern ethics.
And thirdly, the metamodern perspective is transpersonal . It sees that even if different organisms do indeed have different behavioral properties, they do not have any core “essence” or “self” that can be pinned down, and their behaviors must always emerge through the interplay of so many other factors interacting non-locally (across time, space and through different dimensions of analysis).
Still with me? Okay, let’s go on then.
So the question becomes, then, not to judge the integrity of the individual and to explain society as based upon an imagined sum of such integrity, but to see how people’s inner lives and behaviors co-emerge in a greater and deeper transpersonal space. And if you have that starting point, it makes perfect sense to talk about integrity.
It’s not how honest and steadfast you are. Those are only surface phenomena indicating a deeper structure of the psyche.
Here it is:
Integrity is a measure of how and to what extent the different parts of your psyche—be it thoughts, beliefs, emotions, habits, reflexes, assumptions, perceptions, evaluations, intentions, motives, or identities—contradict and undermine each other, and/or how well they reinforce and strengthen one another .
Integrity is the measure of how well your psyche is integrated .
That’s it. Lack of integrity is when different parts of us contradict or fail to meet. Hannah Arendt famously wrote about “the banality of evil” when she reported on the trials of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. She held that the most demonic evil could often be understood by studying surprisingly banal processes, actions and events. If we are to believe her, we should also see that the forces of good, of human integrity, solidarity and reason, are equally banal. The banality, if you will, of virtue.
The reason you let your kids down is that your planning and scheduling abilities didn’t rhyme with your promises and intentions as a parent. The reason you found yourself lying about a slightly embellished past was that your self-image didn’t rhyme with your expectations of others’ treatment and reverence of you. The reason you ripped the living heart out of that nice young lady was that your sexual drives weren’t integrated with your attachment patterns.
Even two “good” qualities can give rise to “bad” emergent properties if they happen to marry poorly. Let’s say you are honest and kind: Your honest feedback to another person made them see a bad pattern in their life, but then you were to kind to push harshly for a needed change. In the end, this left the other person confused and unhappy, stuck between two life patterns. The different parts of you were not integrated . It’s that banal.
Nordic Ideology Page 35
